John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PAT BUCHANAN IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Trump Calls Off Cold War II
“There will be no Cold War II. Trump has signaled a historic shift in U.S. foreign policy that may determine the future of the nation and the fate of his presidency”
Well, I very much wish that it were so.
But one man, and one who is much disliked in Washington, even within his own party, can do no such thing.
There is, and I say this very sadly, no sense of realism in what Pat Buchanan writes.
Indeed, even a President well-liked by his fellow politicians in Washington could do no such thing because American Presidents simply do not have that kind of power. Power is distributed in Washington among a number of major establishment figures and interest groups, and none of them shows any sign of supporting Trump’s views of Russia.
This very morning, Washington’s major politicians are widely quoted, and all of the major Western newspapers are just full of sensational accusations, calling Trump a "traitor." They actually use that strong and stinging word, over and over, for a sitting American President. I don’t recall anything like it.
America's establishment has powerful drives pushing its Russo-phobia, and those do not disappear just because Trump talks to Putin.
The drives are not identified in public speeches and documents about Russia. No, they are hidden, kept in the dark, just as is America’s support for the savage bands of mercenaries posing as jihadis or freedom fighters who have worked to destroy peaceful countries like Syria, Libya, and others in recent years.
In America, nothing which really drives affairs is out on the surface to be seen and understood by the public. It just does not work that way in a fairly ruthless imperial power which maintains the pose of land of liberty and human rights, an imperial power in fact run by a fairly small establishment of special interests. It does not put its dirty laundry out to be seen.
The accusations filling the newspapers this morning are reinforced by the fact that Trump has been attacked from the beginning about being too friendly with Russia, and the people who created that phony line of attack knew just what they were doing.
They understood the vulnerabilities of this political outsider who suddenly came from nowhere to seize control of a major party, one long adrift with little purpose, and to go on to win America’s biggest political prize.
That simply is not the way things are supposed to happen in America’s carefully constructed political duopoly, one designed to give an illusion of democracy while guaranteeing that the establishment wins every election, at least in terms of the military and imperial interests which really matter. Both parties are slavishly loyal to those.
Trump simply cannot change the reasons driving the establishment’s Russo-phobia, and the reasons are shared by the Democrats, major Republicans, powerful lobbies, the CIA, and the Pentagon – pretty much every party making up the American power establishment.
He is himself a confused figure, here talking about fighting the establishment - “the swamp” as he calls it - there perfectly serving its interests. And doing all of it with boisterous and unpleasant rhetoric which only helps the establishment in promoting its dislike of him.
The charges of “treason” sound just like the Cold War to me, at its worst, and I lived through the Cold War. This is a repeat of ugly Senator Joe McCarthy in about 1950, wildly waving his sheets of paper supposedly filled with lists of communists and traitors in the government.
Sen. McCarthy was in fact a closet-drunk trying to fire up a failing political career, and he was encouraged secretly by some powerful Washington interests for a while – people like J. Edgar Hoover - because his ugly nonsense served their dark purposes.
McCarthy was both a hateful man and a victim of secret establishment interests, and that is just the way I see Trump.
The situation in Washington much resembles what it was in the early 1950s, only the secret purposes of the establishment actors creating the whole flap are somewhat different, as you would expect with the passage of seventy years.
Again, much about what really is going on is found here:
http://chuckmanotherchoiceofwords.blogspot.com/2018/07/john-chuckman-comment-why-i-think-trump.html
